One research group at Goddard has actually benefitted from Hubble's misground mirror: images of the binary star system R Aquarii are so bright that they saturate the Faint Object Camera's detectors, but analysis of the smearing caused by the aberration is yielding better data than could be had with a properly-ground mirror.
Dornier to provide High Resolution Stereo Camera for a Soviet 1994 Mars orbiter.
First demonstrations of full "automatic dependant surveillance", with airliner positions automatically transmitted by satellite to ground stations while the airliner is beyond radar range, carried out Oct 21 by a Northwest Airlines transPacific 747 flight using Inmarsat links.
Marginally space related... Seismographs [!] in southern California were used to determine that two unusually loud sonic booms heard early in the morning of Oct 31 were from two different aircraft flying at circa Mach 3 [!] at circa 30,000ft [!!]. (The instruments have heard SR-71s and shuttle orbiters in the past.) Naturally, the USAF, the USN, and NASA/Dryden deny having anything fast in the air at the time; the obvious conclusion is that they were something secret from one of the "black" bases in Nevada.
Launch of Eutelsat 2 from the Cape slips yet again due to electronics problems in the Centaur inertial platform. This is the fourth delay of this launch; another Atlas 2 in the queue behind it, carrying a DSCS military comsat, is also being delayed now.
Various DSN users agree to give Galileo a lot of DSN time for several days starting Nov 7 so that one Gaspra image can be transmitted.
House-Senate budget compromise strongly supports SDI in the wake of the Gulf War's demonstration of allied vulnerability to ballistic missiles. The compromise calls for deployment of limited missile defences at a single site, probably the old Grand Forks ABM base, by 1996, and immediate negotiations with the Soviets aimed at easing the treaty provisions that permit only one ABM site.
Rocket Systems Corp of Japan bids the H-2 to launch the Inmarsat 3s. Potential customers are interested, but question Japan's ability to compete on price and the political feasibility of altering the agreement with Japan's fishermen that restricts Tanegashima launches to two short seasons each year. RSC says it has bid on other commercial launch requirements, but declines to give details. It is lobbying to get the agreement with the fishermen changed, saying that the combination of six-month delays from any serious launch problems and the high costs of building only two H-2s per year will make it very difficult to compete. They are pushing Japanese reliability as a partial counter to expected high costs, but admit that they do not expect many foreign customers.
The two NASA spacecraft for the International Solar Terrestrial Physics Program -- "Wind" and "Polar" -- are facing a 100% cost overrun and launch delays of 5-6 months. This may affect overall science output by messing up coordinated observations that had been planned with other spacecraft; in particular, one major objective of Wind was to get solar plasma measurements upstream of the Earth at the same time as Japan's Geotail spacecraft is doing them downstream. Factors blamed for the problems are the need to contract out construction (to GE) because many of Goddard's experienced in-house satellite builders have retired or been promoted, the delay in nailing down detailed requirements until after the program was already under contract, an inability to use as many off-the-shelf components as originally expected, and problems shielding sensors from spacecraft internal magnetic fields. NASA is also expecting a 30% overrun on US instruments for ESA's Soho mission, another ISTP component.
SVR4: proving that quantity is | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology not a substitute for quality. | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry